Category talk:LGBT People
The presence of Gregory Hemingway, who was transgendered, and continued his marriage to his wife after his reassignment surgery, seemed to justify a more catchall category. TR (talk) 18:46, January 22, 2015 (UTC) :I have three concerns, one minor, two major. :The minor one: HT never uses the phrase "LGBT" nor writes anything that suggests those four groups of people should be lumped together. ::X-time makes use of the acronym if memory serves. It's usage is becoming widespread enough in the culture. TR (talk) 02:40, January 23, 2015 (UTC) :The first major one: As long as we keep Homosexuals separate, growth potential is down to transgendered, and that means it's close to zero. HT mostly writes in time periods that are more than fifty years behind us, usually still more--times when being openly transgendered was all but impossible both socially and medically. The closest you could get might be transvestism (and I think we have one or two historical figures who were known to dabble in that, but I can't think of anyone offhand). ::We can move homosexuals into the broader category. I don't have a problem one way or the other. TR (talk) 02:40, January 23, 2015 (UTC) :The second major one, which is related to the first: We're now more or less obligated to start categorizing Bisexuals, either in their own subcat or here in this category. Offhand I can't think of any fictional bisexual characters HT has written (no, scratch that, there's one, an acquaintance of Krasta's in occupied Priekule whose name escapes me; but given the sorry state of the Derlavai categories, I can't imagine we have an article for him). So we're limited to historical figures; and the problem with that is, there are so very many of those alleged to be bisexual. However, in most cases, the allegations are ambiguous at best, resting on all manner of rumor and gossip that's pretty much impossible to confirm or invalidate. Take Julius Caesar, for instance: Was he or wasn't he? That debate has raged, albeit relatively quietly, for centuries. I remember one scene in one of the Videssos books where Scaurus very reluctantly repeats to himself the old chestnut about his having been "every man's wife and every woman's husband." And there are at least a couple dozen other characters in the Historicals category about whom the question has been raised. I for one have no stomach for sifting through and trying to decide who was and who wasn't; but the mere fact that this category now exists on our wiki makes excluding those dubious cases as much of a commitment as including them would be. ::I'm fine with excluding the uncertain ones. Realistically, if we don't know, we don't know. TR (talk) 02:40, January 23, 2015 (UTC) :::Yeah, leaving out anyone for whom it's not certain is for the best, I think. Turtle Fan (talk) 01:52, January 24, 2015 (UTC) :: We have Publius Quinctilius Varus from Give Me Back My Legions!. I recall a throw away line of thought from his POV where he reflects that like any cultured Roman aristocrat he had tried boys but preferred women. The inference was that at that point in Roman society sex for pleasure was wider ranging and that it wasn't so much a question of orientation but more of what was most enjoyable. I don't know how accurate that is but given Turtledove's background, I would give it serious consideration. ML4E (talk) 21:46, January 23, 2015 (UTC) :::I vaguely recall reading that Roman men did that from another source (I don't recall which) so I'm okay with its historicity. With that being so, and with the context for Varsus's comments that you offer, it sounds like he might be heterosexual by orientation but tried gay sex out of some sort of social obligation or peer pressure. I don't think they had our understanding of dichotomous (trichotomous?) categories of orientation, and more and more I'm coming to be persuaded that sexual orientation is a social construct, that people just like what they like. But that's hardly on point for this discussion. Turtle Fan (talk) 01:52, January 24, 2015 (UTC) :I'm not saying that this category shouldn't exist, but I feel we'd better decide how we're going to address these things right away, particularly the last one. Turtle Fan (talk) 00:16, January 23, 2015 (UTC) ::It's best to think of this category as a "parent" cat. See for example Category: Heads of State of France. We have Petain since he was the only "Chief of State" to "anchor" the category, and then the monarchs and presidents as sub-cats. I envision a similar approach here. For right now, Gregory is the only transgendered person, so s/he's going to "anchor" for a while. Should we get anymore, then we'll create a transgendered category. Otherwise, well, we have the broad category. TR (talk) 02:40, January 23, 2015 (UTC) ::TR's point here makes sense to me. ML4E (talk) 21:46, January 23, 2015 (UTC) :::Hmm, yes, we do have a history of doing things like this. Very well, I'm satisfied. I just wanted to be sure we were going into this thing with our eyes open. Turtle Fan (talk) 01:52, January 24, 2015 (UTC) Proposed Changes So I reverted an edit to the category's description by Jonathan that would have had the effect of inviting the kind of gutter gossip that so frustrates those of us interested in serious biography. Then I removed some articles that didn't measure up to the standards the new description imposed. That leaves us with only three members of the category: Gregory Hemingway (the loan T in the group, apparently) Lani (I know nothing about her, and the article doesn't say much either, but from the context of the story I feel fairly confident that I can figure it out) and von Steuben (who it is my understanding would be better placed in the Homosexuals category). There's also a confirmed bisexual character that I can think of offhand, though his name escapes me; he sometimes slept with Krasta, and after Priekule was liberated she insisted he was her unborn baby's father; but the baby was born with red hair, so much for that charade. At any rate, let's be realistic: most Derlavai characters are never going to get their own articles. This leaves us with a parent cat that is tiny compared with the subcat it contains. And the criteria for membership in that subcat is very close indeed to the criteria for membership in the parent cat. (Especially when one recognizes that, in HT's canon as in real life, people who identify as homo- or for that matter heterosexual are not always exclusively so. For instance, Gorgidas slept with several women during his travels on the plains. After a while he came to enjoy it, and in his final scene he surprised Scaurus by indicating that he wouldn't mind continuing to dabble, with the unspoken caveat that at least part of what was really motivating him was a desire to reproduce.) A merger seems in order. Our options are to move all the Homosexuals to this category, or to abolish this category and let Homosexuals stand on its own as a subcat of Characters by Family Status (which, by the way, doesn't really seem like a particularly good fit). I could, umm, go either way. Turtle Fan (talk) 00:34, November 1, 2015 (UTC) :Move the articles from the homosexuals category here. That's my vote. TR (talk) 00:56, November 1, 2015 (UTC) ::That was my thought as well. It's a bit more flexible. Turtle Fan (talk) 03:11, November 1, 2015 (UTC) :I agree with the idea and see it has been carried out. Good enough. ML4E (talk) 19:26, November 1, 2015 (UTC) ::Yeah, sorry I didn't wait to hear from you, but somehow I instinctively felt you'd agree. Turtle Fan (talk) 21:17, November 1, 2015 (UTC) :I'm having trouble following this, but the idea seems to be to abolish the homosexuals category and place everything in the lgbt cat. That seems the best idea to me, because it's often hard to tell the difference between the four kinds of people within lgbt, because there are shades of grey for most individuals' biographies.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 22:04, November 1, 2015 (UTC) ::Pretty much, yeah. Turtle Fan (talk) 00:16, November 2, 2015 (UTC)